The impact of cancer-related lower extremity lymphedema on patient quality of life: a qualitative meta-synthesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Lower extremity lymphedema (LEL) is a common and potentially debilitating chronic condition associated with cancer treatment. Research has outlined the substantial psychosocial and quality-of-life (QOL) sequelae associated with lymphedema, primarily of the upper extremities and through the use of quantitative methods. The purpose of this systematic review was to summarize, synthesize, and appraise qualitative literature exploring the impact of LEL on patients' QOL and psychosocial well-being after cancer treatment. Nine databases were searched for qualitative research articles published before May 1, 2022. Six eligible articles were included. Four studies used individual semistructured interviews, one used open-ended survey questions, and one used structured interviews. There was a total of 248 participants (average age: 59.8 years) included in the reviewed articles, ranging from 13 to 178 participants. Most participants were women and had a history of gynecologic cancer. All studies described psychosocial challenges experienced by individuals with cancer-related LEL. Four key themes were identified: (1) physical burden and functional limitations, (2) psychologic and emotional impacts, (3) financial implications, and (4) relational and social sequelae. Despite available qualitative data suggesting that cancer-related LEL has negative consequences on patients' QOL, there is still a significant need for increased research to broaden our understanding of the cancer-related LEL experience to better inform policy and practical guideline development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".